


In the Springtime of her Vodoo

by Kendrix



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: F/F, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 07:34:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18464392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kendrix/pseuds/Kendrix
Summary: The first Rainbow Quartz always had the trappings of a dancer about her.





	In the Springtime of her Vodoo

**Author's Note:**

> I left my laptop at home and thats where all my WIP files are, but I rly felt like writing so its short vignette time. Title is a referrence to a song by Tori Amos.

The first Rainbow Quartz always had the trappings of a dancer about her -  
  
Not that it was always an Earth style dancer, as in one of her last performances sometime in the nineteen-eighties; It couldn't have been, not when she long predated the corresponding outgrowths of human popculture or even the gregorian calendar itself.  
  
Instead, the earlier variants of her appearance modifiers might have resembled the gowns typically worn by Jades, though they had none of their strict, interlocking symmetry; It was not a bug, but a feature, an accident of inexperience for sure, but none too unwelcome, an interlocking mess of various frilly layers arranged in half-done splotches of paint on a brand-new canvas, telling tales of new beginnings that were still capable of becoming anything. She had shorter hair, too, when she was not yet this performance of polished elegance, not yet frozen into subtle patterns of inner discord.  
  
Once, Pearl might have speculated that she must have appeared as a dancer because before they first merged, one of the main things her components had been doing together was to organize many dances, and that perhaps, it was for similar reasons that she had turned out to be a type of gem that was typically thought of as a fighter, since they had chosen to stay and fight together.  
  
Pink Diamond saw that as another smart thought of Pearl's for her to marvel at, but was not interested beyond that - The explanation and reasoning behind it didn't matter to her as much as the fact that it felt good, that it was novel and exciting and, if anything, would seem to prove that the distinctions between gems of different types were not as absolute as the ideologies of the authority had made them out to be. (Which was conductive to her sincerely-held convictions, yes, and a concept that had much inspired her many followers, but it was also the desperate hope that she hung onto to even distantly envision her own salvation)  
  
But at the time, Pearl had still struggled with thinking of herself as a fighter at all, or as much of anything for that matter, and it was much easier to believe with the feeling of unparalleled power coursing through her, the might to devastate worlds, or fill them with life - Not that there was anything she wanted to DO with that power, not when the other half of her wanted to forget that it had ever existed, to become something else in these fields, something sweeter and purer in origin and nobler in connotation, anything other than dreadful, anything other that what she was, anything that was more like a breeze of honeyed spring and flowers rather than two lost girls desperately trying to find their way.  
Perhaps it was Pearl who brought in the silks and sheers and sparkles, but would you believe that it was her who might gravitate towards the look of an Earth-style dancer, let alone a nineteen-eighties one?  
  
Not that any part of Rainbow Quartz wanted to do anything other than dance, to simply be here and relish in her own existence, if only it weren't for this large, complicated world that made anything else necessary, and, in that sense, she was not that different from Garnet, though there were things that she could never do as one, thoughts she could never touch without falling apart.  
  
For while she held the memories of organising a great many balls, Rainbow Quartz would never go to a single one; Though she had often, in a sense, dreamt about going.  
  
Both her components wanted to bring her, bring each other, but in the whole time that she existed in this form, the Fusion was the only one who ever knew, since she alone knew both their thoughts at once.  
They had never told each other, for when they thought of what might happen if they were to spin each other round in the broad daylight of everone's scandalized glares, what the consequences might be - they would freeze in the tracks of old calcified pain and even older fears, and Rainbow Quartz could not exist there, whenever either of her components thought of that, she would surely scatter apart.  
  
Thus, she could only dance in secret, in the dewy forests of the Earth that had been her birthplace. Here alone they could dance freely, with no one here to watch, spinning round and round, basking in borrowed boldness and borrowed elegance, and round, in the most whimsical twists and turns that neither of them could have managed on their own, each of them ascribing the magic entirely to the other.  
  
She would twirl around in rapturous ecstasy so much friendlier with her limbs when they were transfigured into something other than the metaphorical locks and chains or the baton of subjugation, nothing but motion, nothing but wonder, nothing but springtime, like a schoolgirl crush not yet touched by the impurities of their world, the part in both their minds that wanted to cry out: "Take me, take all of me, for I do not care what you might do!" If only the world were a safe enough place to do that, if only the two of them were brave enough to do so in this cold universe full of the darkness abd fear that had permeated their lives, and the world that would make such a simplemost thing into an act of resistance.  
  
But they could never forget for long.  
  
Eventually, Pearl thought it proper to rearrange the sheer folds into some semblance of symmetry and what part of hers had been quite fond of the whimsical asymetrical, bright-magenta tutu decided to fall silent, ashamed to reveal such a silly, childlike thought.  
  
That was sometime after the supposed shattering, when they could present her to Biggs and to Garnet without immediately giving away their secret, rehearsed and sanitized like the version of the story that they got to see. And Garnet might have wondered why the cutout at the center never quite formed a star, but in the end, she never seriously questioned their leader, much like she hadn't wondered why Ruby and Sapphire never thought it necessary to don the emblem when they were on their own.  
  
But for all her symmetry, grace and synchronicity, for all that her arms and legs moved as one, Rainbow Quartz would always look at the world through two very different perspectives, though each pair of her eyes.  
  
She sees through both, so the tangle of reasons that brings her into the world doesn't always make sense to her, since it is too often grounded in their separateness. But by her very nature, there is at least one thing that Rainbow Quartz does know even if she is the only one who does: If, despite all the mental drawyers, desperate circumstances, mistakes and breaches of trust, there could be a spark of something genuine.  
  
Each time she comes to be, she knows just by existing; But once she splits apart, neither of the two knew enough to make themselves believe it.


End file.
